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Since George Osborne’s own rules require the pre-submission of the Autumn Statement to the Office for Budget Responsibility, today’s statement was signed off by senior ministers the weekend before last at Nick Clegg’s house in Putney. They have had 10 days, therefore, to brood on the measures unveiled to the rest of us this afternoon: in effect, the Coalition’s mid-term strategy.

With a shiver, they have recalled the painful unravelling of the Budget in March, the protracted agony that launched the Coalition’s first real “omnishambles”. The question is not what people think of the Autumn Statement today, says one ally of Osborne: “It’s what they think a week or a fortnight from now. Will it be seen as a reprieve for George or a public confession of failure?”

Even before the gathering chez Clegg, it was etched into the Government’s assumptions that the Chancellor would face a blizzard of controversy over his own missed targets — notably his declared intention to reduce public debt as a share of national income by 2015-16. In government, Ed Balls was no stranger to shifting goalposts. But that was never going to stop him tap-dancing on the grave of Osborne’s original aspirations.

As the OBR’s growth forecasts are adjusted down, a bleak prairie of cuts stretches to the horizon. George had a few goodies to pull out of Santa’s sack — a cut in corporation tax and a further rise in the personal allowance to £9,440. But the day belonged to Scrooge.

In the crudest sense, what distinguishes a Keynesian like Balls from a fiscal conservative such as Osborne is the former’s faith in the power of state stimulus to dictate a nation’s economic destiny. The Chancellor does not believe that the risk of triple-dip recession can be averted by ripping up his fiscal strategy and trying to spend his way to growth. His addiction is not to austerity in itself but to market credibility. Although Clegg could not conceal his disagreement with Osborne over the specific practicalities of a property tax, it is all too easy to forget that the Coalition remains impressively united behind its core economic objective — which is why David Laws has been busily defending today’s measures.

In the words of one senior source: “We are banking on trajectory mattering more than targets.” To put it another way: this Autumn Statement may mark a falling short, but it also signals a clear and undeviating direction of travel — what Osborne repeatedly called “the right track”.

Reading its runes, one can learn a lot about where the Coalition is heading and — in some respects — what a fully Conservative government might do. Welfare cuts remain central to Osborne’s approach, although he is still privately concerned about the practicalities of Iain Duncan Smith’s universal credit, due to be launched next year. IDS sees benefit reform as primarily a social crusade, and only secondarily as an exercise in fiscal realism. The Chancellor, not surprisingly, wants to save money. Today’s announcement that most benefits will increase by only one per cent for three years is but a taste of what is to come.

To ensure Lib-Dem support for these stringencies — and to keep alive the Prime Minister’s still-cherished mantra that “we are all in this together” — Osborne also had to maintain pressure on the wealthy. He was robust on tax evasion and avoidance, declaring that even the gnomes of Zurich were not beyond his reach.

Today’s reduction in tax relief on pension contributions will, by definition, affect and irritate the affluent more than low earners — the cash-strapped families on council estates for whom the very notion of a tax-free annual pension pot of £40,000 is Leprechaun-omics, a fairytale that happens in other people’s gardens. As for the strivers — and drivers — they were rewarded with the cancellation of the planned fuel duty increase.

In the grand scheme of things — public spending in 2011-12 was £695 billion — the £5 billion earmarked for capital projects today may seem marginal. But the mini-bonanza (or nano-bonanza, if you are more sceptical) is significant in two ways. First, the shift to capital expenditure — roads, rail, flood defence schemes — is a reminder of the Heseltinian heart that beats within this Government’s Lawsonian frame: a love of infrastructure, of the grand projet, of building, that was naturally stoked by the triumph of the Olympics. Second, the £1 billion to fund 50,000 extra classroom places and to help academies and free schools has symbolic as well as practical implications: with this prize for Michael Gove on Speech Day, so to speak, Cameron and Osborne are telling the other pupils what really impresses them.

Like the much-missed Steve Hilton, the Education Secretary believes that a government must always behave as if it only has one term in office and confront what President Obama, quoting Martin Luther King, calls the “fierce urgency of now”. Gove wants to transform his department into a much leaner administrative hub and scrap national pay bargaining for teachers — as a result of which he is facing ferocious resistance from officials who have made their careers obstructing Conservative and Blairite reformers. To get a sense of what a purely Tory government might do after 2015 — or what Cameron and Osborne want it to be like — look no further than the education reforms of the Sage of Surrey Heath.

What’s more: if this Autumn Statement can withstand the fire-testing of the next few days, it will do much for the Chancellor’s political stock — radically underpriced for most of 2012. Was the Budget a blip or a stepping-stone to personal decline? As long as Osborne exudes competence, the public appears content to regard austerity as a deeply unpleasant by-product of depersonalised economic woe, not a wicked Tory plot.

In his splendid memoir, In the Corridors of Power, Labour peer David Lipsey observes that, by the end of Gordon Brown’s reign as Chancellor, the Treasury had become “the department for public spending” — with terrible consequences. As long as the voters sense the Coalition is cleaning up another man’s mess in desperately adverse global circumstances, Osborne and his colleagues are safe. But nobody knows better than George the Great Survivor that today’s triumph is tomorrow’s omnishambles. Is he still a potential Prime Minister? We’ll know in a few days’ time.